Category: music

Why make a list now? “There’s new management in many other houses, including major companies in Houston and San Francisco as well as dynamic smaller companies such as Atlanta Opera and Madison Opera. And everyone’s talking about the same thing and asking the same questions: What’s the future of the art-form? Where are new audiences going to come from? How are we going to maintain the cultural relevance of opera in the United States? In response to this compelling scenario we made a list of 25 names that represent power in the industry now as the industry looks forward.”

Little out-of-the-way Salida, Colorado doesn’t have much music. But every summer, the toen hosts a major league chamber muic series. “The historic Arkansas River town of 5,000, best known for kayaking and art galleries, is hardly a classical-music mecca, yet folks there have managed to keep a summer chamber series going for 30 years.”

A survey of musicians in the Seattle Symphony shows widespread unhappiness with music director Gerard Schwarz and the orchestra’s ineffectual board, which recently renewed the conductor’s contract to a 26th season. “The comments – mostly centering on the artistic direction of the orchestra, which Schwarz has led since 1983 – are overwhelmingly negative about the music director and the current leadership of the board, widely regarded as his ally.”

London’s Proms concerts are deeply embedded into the national culture. “If the Proms, now in their 112th season, are the world’s most important music festival, they are also the most unchanging. And this is both their strength and, some say, their weakness.”

This year’s London Proms include no women composers. “It’s a gaffe, certainly, and one no Proms director will ever dare to make again. And it raises all kinds of ticklish questions, such as whether women composers and conductors should benefit from positive discrimination, until the ancient bias against them has finally faded away.”

Music critic Tom Service packs off to conducting school. How hard can it be? “As a critic, I’ve spent years talking about what conductors do, blithely assessing their interpretations, gestures, and podium antics, as if I knew how to do it better. Of course, with the virtual orchestra of my imagination, I can kid myself that I do, but what the course made me realise is just how hard it is to communicate your intentions to a group of musicians.”

“Muzak began recasting itself in the mid-1980s and got a radical makeover when it relocated [to South Carolina]from Seattle in the late 1990s. Today its “audio architects” blend art and science to deliver original-artist music from Mozart to Gwen Stefani that fits the bill for some 400,000 clients from Dunkin’ Donuts to Bank of America. Muzak owns publishing rights to some 1.5 million songs.”

A European court has reversed approval of a merger of two of the world’s largest recording companies – Bertelsmann and Sony. “The Court said regulators had not adequately shown that the 2004 deal would not hurt competition. The merger created the world’s second-biggest record label.”

With only two months to go before the opening of its new concert hall, the Orange County (CA) Performing Arts Center is still frantically raising the money it needs to complete construction and manage the facility. The effort got a big boost this week with the announcement of a $5 million gift by a longtime OCPAC board member’s family. The center has thus far raised $138 million for the concert hall since 1999, on a total goal of $200 million.

“The body of the world’s most famous castrato singer, Farinelli, has been exhumed to try to find out how his virtuoso voice developed. Scholars in the northern Italian city of Bologna will measure his skull and bones and perform DNA tests… In 17th and 18th Century Italy, up to 4,000 boys a year, often from poor families, were castrated from the age of eight upwards. They became opera singers and soloists in church choirs and royal palaces. Very few actually went on to achieve success, but those who did became the pop stars of their day, and they behaved as such.”